I’m warning to the idea

A couple of days ago, I mentioned my intention to ditch the TV side of my cable subscription and go to a seldom-mentioned internet-only tier of service. In that entry I mentioned that one of the few things that gave me pause about ditching cable TV (especially since I haven’t gotten a DTV converter box) was that I’d be losing the local channels for severe weather coverage. Unless you’ve lived in tornado alley and have intimate knowledge of the kind of “combat readiness” that living here in the springtime entails, that may sound silly, but trust me…it’s a biggie around here. I have a weather alert radio to fill that gap, but I was curious about the possibility of what they’d call “a software solution” in the business world.

I did a little bit of research and found Interwarn, a commercial software package that offers TV-style warning crawlers on your monitor, as well as graphical watch/warning maps (sort of like the things that, anymore, take up about a quarter of the TV screen during bad weather). It’s astoundingly customizable – you can decide what kind of warnings will trigger a crawler, and not every crawler will trigger an alert sound (which can be whatever kind of .wav file you feel like making it – the temptation’s definitely there to bust out the old Star Trek red alert sound…); the degree to which you can define the area involved is amazing too. I live on the border of Arkansas and Oklahoma, and I can pick counties out of two states for the program to keep an eye on. If I wanted to, I could have it watch out for my old stomping grounds in Brown County, Wisconsin too. It takes up a startlingly small slice of CPU resources and bandwidth, despite checking in for new warnings about every 90 seconds. (As with so many other things, you can slow that down so it’s only checking every 3 minutes or however often you like; honestly, in this part of the country, I left it at the check-as-often-as-you-can default.) Quite by accident, I also discovered that it happily pops warning crawlers up on top of full-screen video – there you go, you can still get warnings while watching a movie or what have you.

Here’s a shot of the live National Weather Service radar loop with Interwarn’s live watch/warning map. Who needs a TV station anyway?

(Why am I watching Oklahoma’s watches and warnings? Since we’re on the border, it’s a given that what barrels through Oklahoma will wind up in Arkansas; this is also why I used to watch KTUL during severe weather events and then turn to the local stations when the stuff actually arrived here.)

The company behind Interwarn also has a software package called Stormlab, but it’s geared toward a higher-end market – real live meteorologists (or students thereof) and/or storm chasers. My inner weather geek is more than happy with Interwarn alone.

The registration fee is $40, but since we’ll be saving that much on our cable bill within two months by dropping TV, I’m not even blinking at that figure. While my cable TV’s still hooked up, however, this afternoon was stormy enough to provide a live-fire test. I watched the local TV stations and I watched Interwarn running on a machine that, other than also keeping the live radar in a browser, wasn’t doing anything. Interwarn was either neck-and-neck with the TV station warning crawlers…or, more often, it was faster than the TV stations. (Fun fact: Interwarn isn’t worried about pissing off sponsors by running a crawler during a commercial.)

The one problem is that whatever machine’s running Interwarn, in a severe weather situation, really needs to be a machine that you don’t mind leaving up and running in that sort of weather. I recently “decommissioned” Orac and all but gutted it, but sometime between now and next spring, Orac may return as a bare-bones machine that, when push comes to shove, won’t be a great loss if it eats lightning, but until then will serve a fairly vital purpose, especially during storm season.

Software solution found. I don’t think I’ve ever gone from “let’s see what this shareware trial version does” to “oh yeah, baby, let me know where to send the money for the registered version!” in the course of an afternoon…but I’m totally sold on Interwarn.

Links: Interwarn